Flywheels - A Dad's Guide

Lately I have been thinking about all the things in life that are like flywheels.

A flywheel is a mechanical device that stores rotational energy. Think a heavy metal disc gradually being spun up to speed. After putting work into spinning up the flywheel, you gain the benefit of a tremendous amount of stored energy readily available for use.

A lot of things in life are like flywheels.

You work at a thing that you want to achieve, the flywheel spinning slowly as you put more energy into that thing. It is hard going to muster the energy to crank that wheel at first, but eventually you get it up to speed. After the flywheel is spinning at the rate you want it, then it becomes really easy to keep it going.

One-and-a-half years ago, my wife and I were newlyweds and trying to set our lives up. We were living in a two-bedroom apartment at the time, and Yuri was pregnant with our daughter.

The house that we just bought was sitting empty and needed quite a lot of work before we moved in—leaky roof, non-functional kitchen built in the 1950’s—it was pretty bad at the time. We essentially needed to make our house liveable so that we could nest with our baby-to-be.

At the time it was overwhelming the things we had to do: the renovations, prepping for the baby, and coming up with all the scratch to pay for it all.

Our kitchen reno, in various stages of completion

At first, starting the whole enterprise was a lot of work with little to see for it. We had to find and hire decent contractors, obtain a ton of baby stuff for cheap, and budget the whole enterprise carefully over the following months.

Then, as things began to spin increasingly faster, our contractors started work on our roof, kitchen, and living room. A trickle, then a flood of baby items poured in, donated by friends or gotten on the cheap second hand. Our careful budgeting paid off, as we managed to keep costs reasonably low.

Near the end, things were happening fast, fast, fast. We had to select the countertop for the kitchen. The tiles for the roof. The baby crib. All the while we were moving our stuff from the apartment to our new house.

Then, suddenly everything was completed. We had a beautiful updated kitchen. Our humidity levels in our house went back to safe levels thanks to our newly installed roof. The nursery was starting to take fine shape. And we were happily moved into our new house.

After that, it was very little work (by comparison) to maintain the house and add to our nursery. Creating our nest was like spinning up a very heavy flywheel—a ton of work at the beginning, gradually getting easier over time until things were set up and became a piece of cake.

This post is the beginning of a series about how a dad can use Flywheels to improve life for himself and his family.

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting on the various flywheels in life that you can start and spin up to speed. Posts will include:

The Flywheel of Baby Care
The Flywheel of Great Sleep
The Flywheel of Spare Time
The Flywheel of Family Happiness
The Flywheel of Personal Finance
The Flywheel of Physical Fitness

Starting up a system of Flywheels makes your life easier and better, but there is a certain way to do this. As humans, we are limited by what we can focus on at any one time. By spinning up one wheel at a time, you can focus on improving your life section by section, one at a time. As you build up your Flywheels, life gets easier because your other Flywheels keep spinning and doing the work for you.

There are many annoying aspects of life that drag on the mind and body. Whenever that happens, you need to build a Flywheel to solve the problem!